Yes this is something I worry about alot. AI has already created more inequality, firstly by hugely concentrating huge amounts of wealth in a handful of companies, and secondly by creating a digital divide – between those (like you and I) who have access to the internet and those who do not.
My view is that the whole point of automation is that we can all work less. But that can only happen if the wealth created by robotics and AI is shared by all in society. Right now it is not, and that is wrong.
To add to what Alan has said, in my role as a data scientist, I develop AI tools which can be used to help scientists categorise and annotate data from the vast quantities of scientific studies that are published every day.
It’s becoming an impossible task for researchers like myself to read all this data manually, so assigning this task to AI actually helps me do my work and make my findings more relevant (e.g. the data aren’t years out of date by the time I’ve read and annotated it all to provide a summary).
The AI tools that my research group and I are freely available for scientists to use, which we hope will avoid financial inequality.
I think that there is a lot that scientists can do to to make sure that AI benefits society, not individual people, and does not harm individual people. I think it’s really important that you’re passionate about this topic, and that you should continue to voice your concerns and opinions.
Hi Emma, thank you for answering my question (for some reason my name is showing up as anonymous and I don’t know why!). I think this is a fascinating topic and I think it is becoming increasingly important as the capabilities of AI increase. I can see from your comment that AI definitely has its benefits in relation to sorting out vast data sets but can also have extremely negative effects if it is not used correctly.
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Emma commented on :
To add to what Alan has said, in my role as a data scientist, I develop AI tools which can be used to help scientists categorise and annotate data from the vast quantities of scientific studies that are published every day.
It’s becoming an impossible task for researchers like myself to read all this data manually, so assigning this task to AI actually helps me do my work and make my findings more relevant (e.g. the data aren’t years out of date by the time I’ve read and annotated it all to provide a summary).
The AI tools that my research group and I are freely available for scientists to use, which we hope will avoid financial inequality.
I think that there is a lot that scientists can do to to make sure that AI benefits society, not individual people, and does not harm individual people. I think it’s really important that you’re passionate about this topic, and that you should continue to voice your concerns and opinions.
anon-256449 commented on :
Hi Emma, thank you for answering my question (for some reason my name is showing up as anonymous and I don’t know why!). I think this is a fascinating topic and I think it is becoming increasingly important as the capabilities of AI increase. I can see from your comment that AI definitely has its benefits in relation to sorting out vast data sets but can also have extremely negative effects if it is not used correctly.